Monday, November 28, 2011

The Walking Dead has its midseason finale

The Walking Dead has been boring nearly everyone lately. Sure, there are some people who think this is one of the best seasons ever. But there are others who realize that if you skipped any one of the past five episodes and then just jumped back in, you wouldn’t even notice that you had missed anything. There are too many stretches of this show where people walk and look grim. The pauses between dialogue are too long. Speaking of dialogue, the show could get better at that. The dialogue is hardly ever interesting on this show.

One thing we like about the first half of this season is Hershel and his creepy theory that the Walkers aren’t dead, just diseased. The fact that he was keeping a bunch of Walkers in his barn in order to wait for them to be healed is just psycho. It’s probably a realistic response for someone to have though. Obviously, the best thing about last night was dead Sophia, which shocked a good number of viewers and effectively ended the “meander around looking for Sophia” storyline, which could have been done in a lot less time. Hershel will probably order everyone off of his farm now, for good. We think that the gang should steal the farm from him, but that’s just us. We’re brutal.

Shane and Daryl are the season MVPs so far, with Shane making things interesting and Daryl showing some depth. These characters are mostly pretty flat, but giving Daryl a good side gives us hope for this show. We also like Maggie. We really only like Rick because he’s a good guy and he’s hot. His character could get better as a character. We are annoyed by horn-dog, comic-relief Glenn, when before we respected him for being brave. Lori … ugh. The fact that she didn’t know that the morning after pill won’t abort her WEEKS OLD FETUS made us hate her. Possibly forever. What a dumb ass.

Andrea needs to quit looking anguished and Dale needs to leave her alone. We’re glad that Rick knows that Lori slept with Shane. That needed to not drag that out. Will the gang be mad at Hershel for keeping Sophia in the barn and allowing the gang to go out in the woods looking for her all the time, endangering themselves? This show is about to lose real-time status with us and become a DVD show. We think it would be better if we could watch all of these slow episodes in a row. We still want to watch the show, but if this is the way it's going to be, we want to binge it in a day, not stick with it for weeks.

Episode grade: B+Grade for the first half of the season, as a whole: C+

3 comments:

I went back and watched the first six episodes on Netflix without stopping over Thanksgiving, and you know, the show was much more gripping. I think that the slow burn nature of the pacing makes it perfect for that type of viewing.

I really had no illusions that the farm commune thing would end badly; this whole show ends badly i.e. all roads lead to dead. Again, I think the fact that there is just no hope is it's main turn-off.

Still, there aren't any other zombie apocalypse shows competing for space, and as far as these things go it's a work of art compared to Romero's campy horror. To attract the mainstream for the long-term, though, TWD will have to improve in a number of areas which you ably pointed out. Here's hoping...

Have you heard the theory that when a Republican is president, zombies/zombie stuff gets good and popular, and when a Democrat is in office, vampires are the craze? Maybe we will get more zombie apocalypse stuff when Obama leaves, haha.

I just watched every episode of this show over the past two days and I'm hooked. I may have liked it less if I watched it spaced out over weeks or months. But I like pretty much everything about it. Kinda annoyed that I have to wait until February for a new episode.

About the bloggers

Ern is a lawyer. Ern's all-time favorite shows are LOST and Breaking Bad. Other favorites include Homeland and South Park. She also enjoys opera, water skiing, arguing, and movies. Ern responds to most of the comments, because they go directly to her phone. Ern also starts most of the posts and leaves them half done, as drafts, for Leeard to finish. As far as international visitors go, Ern is excited to see visitors from Germany, the UK, and Israel.

Leeard is a technology consultant and a nice Italian Catholic girl. Leeard's all-time favorite show is Gilmore Girls, but her favorite shows on right now are Game of Thrones, Pretty Little Liars, and The Vampire Diaries. Leeard can do your taxes, loves sports, and has an insane amount of pop culture knowledge. Leeard is excited to see visitors from Russia and Poland because she speaks conversational Russian and Polish (and Spanish).

We started this blog because of our insane addictions to TV. We thought that, while we were "wasting our lives," we would at least get writing and thinking practice out of it.